“Who was the man?”
“He was a law clerk at the time, by the name of Eddington.”
He had learned his skills well from one of the most powerful barristers in England.
“And you decided to contact Miss Mallory,” Brodie replied.
“I thought she needed to know the sort of man she was going to marry, the kind that would do knowingly something like that.”
People are not what they pretend to be.
And the second letter.
Secrets and lies are the devil’s work.
Cora Walmsley had answered the question about the letters that Charlotte Mallory had received. Both letters were an attempt to right a horrible wrong that had obviously haunted John Walmsley all those years. And no doubt an attempt to warn Charlotte Mallory against marrying Andrew Eddington, who was complicit in the scheme, something that was quite illegal—the bribery of a witness for the sake of a client, Gerald Ormsby.
Ormsby was eventually released for lack of evidence, and then dead merely a matter of months later in a riding accident. Perhaps justice had been served.
All of it was tragic to be certain, and the Walmsleys had both suffered for it, along with the loss of their child.
Yet, there was still the question: why were two young women now dead?
“Wot are ye thinkin’?” Brodie asked as the train wound its way back toward London.
We had left Guildford just over an hour earlier with some answers. However, with other questions that still had no answer.
After leaving Cora Walmsley’s cottage, we had stopped by the church at the edge of the village. There we had left funds specifically to help her with food and anything else she might need.
There undoubtedly were those who would have argued that while tragic, what she had done in sending those letters was cruel.
Yet, she had broken no law even though it would have undoubtedly been said that her husband had in the money he had taken to remain quiet about what he had seen and then disappearing.
A tragic choice made not out of greed, but with the best of intentions, yet he had carried the guilt from it to his grave.
“The two murders are somehow connected,” I finally replied, then looked at the man beside me who had far more experience in such things.
“But how? And why?”
Brodie’s hand covered mine. “Your woman’s intuition?”
“It’s there. I know it is. We just haven’t found it yet.”
He folded my hand in his, something that had become a habit.
“Aye,” he agreed. “There is something more that we haven’t yet found. Perhaps Mr. Dooley will have information about that warehouse fire when we return.”
There was a note from Mr. Dooley tucked into the door frame of the office when we arrived.
He found ‘one of the lads,’ as he said, referring to his fellow police, a constable who remembered the fire well. He included the man’s name. He had been on the watch at the docks the night of the fire, and we would do well to meet at the location and speak with him as well.
Perhaps there was something he could tell us about that night.
For myself, I wanted to go over everything we had learned with the hope that I might find something that could be helpful in solving those two murders.
In the meantime, I needed to contact my good friend, Templeton. She had an acquaintance with the manager of the opera house, and a new production was to begin the following evening.
Several weeks earlier I thought it might be a good experience for Lily.
